Stephen A. Smith warned that the FBI arrests of Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups and Miami Heat point guard Terry Rozier related to illegal sports betting and rigged poker games were just the beginning of President Trump’s revenge agenda against NBA players.
On Thursday, FBI Director Kash Patel announced 34 arrests in relation to insider betting and Mob-backed poker games. Among them were Billups and Rozier. Smith said on ESPN’s “First Take” later that day to expect more crackdowns.
“We’ve seen accusations before,” he said. “We’ve seen athletes get in trouble with the law before. You don’t see the director of the FBI having a press conference. It’s not coincidental. It’s not an accident. It’s a statement, and it’s a warning that more is coming.”
Smith went on explaining that more people in the NBA – and possibly even the WNBA – could continue to be targeted by Trump’s administration in the future.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” Smith said. “It’s very concerning. We don’t know where this is gonna go. But everybody better brace themselves, because he’s coming.”
Billups and Rozier were both put on leave following the news. The NBA had just kicked off its new season days before Patel’s announcement of the arrests.
“We take these allegations with the utmost seriousness, and the integrity of our game remains our top priority,” the NBA said in a statement Thursday.
Billups and ex-Cleveland Cavaliers player and assistant coach Damon Jones were named in the poker game indictment as being used as lures by the mob to draw in big spenders to their games. These began in 2019 and were responsible for $7 million lost in the rigged games.
“The defendants and their co-conspirators, who constituted the remaining participants purportedly playing in the poker games, worked together on cheating teams (collectively, the ‘Cheating Teams’) that used advanced wireless technologies to read the cards dealt in each poker hand and relay that information to the defendants and co-conspirators participating in the illegal poker games (collectively, the ‘Rigged Games’),” the court document read.
Rozier, on the other hand, is accused taking himself out of games early in order to affect their outcomes and the bets made on his performance. One instance cited involved a game Rozier played for the Charlotte Hornets in which he told one of his co-conspirators that he planned to leave it early with a “supposed injury,” which allowed others to make advance bets on that exact outcome.
You can watch Smith’s full “First Take” segment in the video above.
